Summary Of Can You Picture That By Douglas Crimp

Can You Picture That? Photography, with the rise of social media outlets such as Instagram, has become a wildly popular medium for modern day art. Although these modern photographs of food, or places one has traveled are often straightforward and representational of the elements in the photo. In the 1970’s however, photography was still a new medium of work, one that proved with the right amount of staging can have a deeper meaning that leaves the audience with questions, and such is the nature of post-modernist art. Douglas Crimp acknowledges this in his 1979 paper, Pictures. He provides a discourse of an art show of the same name, where the works are analysed for what they’re trying to convey. The aspects of work this essay prioritizes are
In his opening, Crimp poses a discourse with an art critic that evidently has a bias against theatrics in postmodernist art. Crimp notes that if one were to follow Fried in keeping the fine arts separate, art itself would come into question due to the usage of different mediums in works.1 This is acknowledged again at the end of the intro when Crimp notes that “What fried demanded of art was ‘presentness,’ a transcendent condition… what he feared would replace that condition as a result of the sensibility he saw at work in minimalism-what has replaced it- is presence, the sine qua non of theatre.”2 which acknowledges that Fried’s fears are based in the delicacy of minimalist art, where he thinks that the presentness of art would lose its favor to. Instead it is temporality-a necessity of theatre-that Crimp states presentness has lost its favor to. The beginning of this paper where Crimp discusses the temporality of the work gets his essay off to a great start, keeping the reader interested and the use of transition statements allow this segment to flow well. The analyzation of temporality through an art critic and an artist are prioritized by Crimp, in a way that creates an interesting introduction to the